Firefight

Sure, you can play Firefight by yourself, but to truly succeed in the game you'll have to play cooperatively with other players. Playing by yourself, you'll be lucky to break 20,000 points on some maps—and par is 200,000.

And a couple of points on team play: 1) Your lives are shared. You start the match with seven lives between you and your teammates, but as you progress through the game you earn bonus lives that'll prolong your Firefight game. 2) Your score is shared, so don't go bein' a glory hog! There's no benefit to you hogging the best weapons and leaving your partners to fend for themselves. Work together, protect their lives as if they were your own and work together to build that score higher and higher.

CombosKilling multiple enemies in quick succession effectively multiplies the score you'd get if you had just killed the enemies individually. A kill that might on its own earn you 50 points could net 200 points if it's a part of a killing spree. The time between kills must be kept very short if you want to keep up a combo, which means that combos are generally built on the lives of weak enemies like grunts, jackals and drones.

A particularly good time to score combos is during reinforcements, when Covenant dropships move in and offload buckets of enemies. Lob grenades onto the ground where tougher enemies land, and then turn your pistol to packs of grunts to fire off a quick succession of headshots. You can earn myriad points.

Big KillsNaturally, the bigger the enemy you kill, the bigger the (point) reward for your deed. Especially valuable kills are hunters and vehicles. If you can work a valuable kill like this into a combo multiplier, you'll earn a ton of points.

EASY

0.25x

NORMAL

1.00x

HEROIC

2.00x

LEGENDARY

4.00x

DifficultyThis is a no-brainer. The difficulty of your game brings with it a score multiplier that affects every point you earn in a game of Firefight. Normal difficulty earns you a baseline 1.00x multiplier. Easy mode reduces the points you earn for everything, while harder difficulties increase the number of points. The multiplier values for each difficulty are listed to the right. Note that while Easy mode effectively cuts your points in half—and then in half again—it is so difficult to die that you may very well get your best scores on that difficulty. It'll just take forever.